View full sizeBenjamin Brink/The OregonianBrian Tarabochia aboard his gill-net boat on the Columbia River, in 2009. Tarabochia and other gill-netters face a challenge this year as a ballot question looms and as regulators try to find a way to push the fishers off the river's mainstem while keeping the profession alive.

The folks trying to ban gill-netting for salmon on the Columbia River may have unwittingly done Oregon a favor by amassing enough signatures to put the question to voters on November's ballot. They've prompted Gov. John Kitzhaber to correctly shunt the emotion-charged question away from an uninformed public and demand that state fishery managers map a path forward that promotes both fish and the jobs associated with their harvest.

But in the doing, he has asked that gill-netters -- a fourth- and fifth-generation commercial fishing crowed based in the lower Columbia, from Astoria to Scappoose -- be pushed off the mainstem of the river and into side channels that are trickier for tides and could require expensive modifications in gear. The immediate beneficiaries would be the burgeoning hook-and-line sportfishing crowd, which already converts the mouth of the Columbia during spring chinook season into a marine rodeo that pours money in riverside economies.

Yet Kitzhaber's directive last Friday to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife Commission is well-reasoned and could find traction today, when the commission opens discussion on it. Mainly, the governor seeks to quickly settle a complex debate that has perennially run aground in the constituency-worn Legislature and state agencies, pitting river groups against one another.

It is true that a simple ballot vote would seem to square the gillnetting-or-not controversy one way or the other, though Washington fishers taking salmon from the Washington side of the river promise yet-unparsed complication in regulating the Columbia's broader fishery. But a gill-netting vote by the public should not frame Oregon policy over a fishery whose management is complicated by 13 runs of federally protected species and over which significant fortunes -- recreational, commercial and tribal -- are at stake.

It is a shame that fewer than 100,000 wild spring chinook return each year to a river once celebrated worldwide for millions of returns. But it's where we are, and we'd better make things right by the fish as well as the fewer fishers who catch them.

Relocating Oregon's gill-netters into bays and areas bolstered by increased hatchery production is worth a close look as long as the gill-netters are kept whole economically. Gill-netters already question whether the state could increase the number of fish in such areas enough to offset the financial hit they would take by being barred from a segment of the river they say contains more robust, profitable, long-haul salmon.

But this is properly the work now of ODF&W, more informed than the sound bite commercials to come before November's ballot. ODF&W is expected on Tuesday to announce a collaboration with Washington regulators in forging a plan that not only protects fish but does so in a way that ensures gill-netters their fair share and allows them to continue to make their many community contributions.

That is a wise first step. But so, too, will be the emphasis soon on upcoming public hearings in which fishers and nonfishers alike will be invited to declare the Columbia's best use -- and by whom. All actions involve more thought, and expertise, than any one-time popular vote could.